Margins of Paradise Gallery

Many years ago, while watching Star Trek: The Next Generation on television, I was struck by what a idealized world the characters lived in. Everything on the ship was perfectly clean and perfectly tidy, even sterile, and everybody was polite and happy. Any deviation from this was almost certainly a plot device.

We often seem to feel that our real lives should be the same way, and when we find that they are not we try at least to make them appear so. We tidy the house before guests come, we cover imagined blemishes with make-up, and we keep our hurts and fears to ourselves as best we can.

In this gallery I offer photographs taken in Toronto, Canada's largest and shiniest city. Walk around in the downtown core and don't look too closely and everything seems very clean and orderly. As always, this is an illusion, and perhaps a harmful one. The Buddha began his journey to wisdom when he first encountered suffering. He left an idealized world of wealth and luxury to find a more comprehensive experience of reality, and in this way he found the truth that he sought.

In just this way, I have explored the margins of the artificial world we live in, hoping to better understand ... what? I'm not sure.

This gallery includes photographs of the abandoned Don Valley Brickworks in Toronto, as well as graffiti inside the brickworks and elsewhere. My interest in graffiti is related to my interest in the lifecycle of things, comprising creation and destruction. Graffiti is often both at once. It is the giving of form to the thoughts and feelings of its creator, and often either the destruction of its substrate, or at least an indication that it is in decline. Unlike many other art forms, the place in which the grafitti is found is an integral part of the work. Sometimes it is harmonious with it, while other times it provides counterpoint, irony, or a transformation of the message.

First Photograph